Johanna Preston
Dr. MacKay, TC 357
December 8, 1999
Lady Audley’s Monomania
For a fictional work written in the Victorian era, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon has far more than its fair share of madness. Monomania is directly mentioned at least five times in the course of the novel, and the characters accuse each other and themselves of madness in many more instances. The difference between monomania and insanity is often obscure. Usually, monomania occurs in a character who is completely absorbed in one idea or train of thought, and passes onto insanity when the character exceeds conventional limits and commits a criminal act based on a particular obsession. Monomania fits well into melodrama since it is sensational and bizarre, and in the Victorian era it was a new field of scientific investigation. It was also frightening since it suggested insanity or malady of the brain, which were unnatural, unpredictable, and generally misunderstood. Lady Audley is the most notorious monomaniac in the novel, and her monomania has multiple “explanations” since there is supposedly a hereditary aspect of her “disease” as well as the typical monomaniacal exaggeration of attention; she is also the only one to commit a crime. Lady Audley enjoys the advantages her monomania brings which help her overcome social barriers to gain wealth and admiration, but she also suffers greatly from the negative effects of her monomania when she is forced to divulge her secret, which may or may not be verifiable.
Born as Helen Maldon, Lady Audley’s entire focus in life is on raising her social rank and wealth. She is an impoverished adolescent when she marries George Talboys, a cornet in a nearby cavalry regiment, merely because he appears to be the richest man available. When George is cut off from his father’s wealth upon their marriage, Helen becomes terribly frustrated and upset, and she criticizes her husband ceaselessly. Eventually, George feels so guilty about their financial situation that he runs away and catches a ship headed to Australia to search for gold. Meanwhile, Helen abandons her father and son, changes her name to Lucy Graham, and teaches at a small private school to establish a reference. These actions are all carefully planned because she means to try again climbing up the social ladder. If her first marriage was a mistake, she will cover up all signs of it. Soon, she is the governess for the Dawsons’ children, and then she bigamously marries a very rich baronet to become Lady Audley. Ironically, George finds a big nugget of gold in Australia, and he writes to his wife about his expected arrival and newly found wealth. Lady Audley is horrified that George has returned after three and a half years, and in order to throw him off, she has someone buried under the name of Helen Talboys.
Through this point, Lady Audley demonstrates her obsession with wealth and social rank. She does not marry either of her two husbands for love—she only wants their money and high social status. The narrator considers how the first seeds of her obsession develop:
Surely, if [Lady Audley’s] thoughts wandered so far along the backward current of her life, she must have repented in bitterness and despair of that first day in which the master-passions of her life had become her rulers, and the three demons of Vanity, Selfishness, and Ambition had joined hands and said, ‘This woman is our slave; let us see what she will become under our guidance.’ (294)
Undoubtedly, ambition is Lady Audley’s monomania. It is ironic that she is overly obsessed with conventional Victorian goals considered righteous and proper; in fact, Lady Audley appears to match almost all the qualities of the feminine ideal. She is a caring wife to Sir Michael Audley (because he has made her rich), she is a graceful, charming hostess, and she is utterly gorgeous (Hughes 124). She also exhibits the fresh innocence of childhood and fully suppresses any indecent desires, demonstrating her high status (Cvetkovich 47). Her works of charity make her immensely popular, and wherever she goes people are delighted by her charm. So far, Lady Audley has made a terrible error, and it is clear she has monomania; however, there is no reason to believe she is “mad” yet. The fact that her husband deserted her without any warning for nearly four years without leaving a trace of his location or well-being balances a lot of the wrong she has done by marrying twice. After all, she would not need to divorce the husband who was in all likelihood dead, and some women might have gone crazy with anxiety from not hearing of their husbands for so long. She says herself, “I have a right to think that he is dead, or that he wishes me to believe him dead, and his shadow shall not stand between me and prosperity” (348).
By pure coincidence, though, George Talboys is a good friend of Robert Audley, Sir Michael’s nephew. Lady Audley hears that Robert plans to bring Mr. Talboys to Audley Court; she has a letter sent to tell Robert accommodation is not currently available at her home, so Robert and George stay at a nearby inn. They tour the mansion one evening when Lady Audley and her husband are away, and in the octagonal bedroom they view her portrait. George is astounded to recognize the face in the portrait as that of his wife, but he does not say anything about it. When Robert and George go fishing at a local stream, George leaves Robert sleeping on the bank with the intention of confronting Lady Audley to accuse her of her awful act of bigamy. Lady Audley anticipates his arrival; they meet in the lime-walk, and after some angry words she pushes him down the deep well to kill him. Robert, grief-stricken at his friend George’s disappearance, appoints himself detective to find out how he vanished. Over time, Robert begins to find a number of clues all pointing to Lady Audley as the culprit. Then, on the night that Robert stays in the inn at Mount Stanning, Lady Audley intentionally catches the building on fire. The owner of the inn, Luke Marks, is terribly burned and dies from the shock to his body. Finally, Robert shows Lady Audley he has proof of her first marriage to George Talboys, and she confesses. She gives up her façade in despair and explains to Sir Michael her crimes, her past, and her life secret of madness. Her monomania has now presumably developed into insanity, and she will be locked up in an insane asylum.
The manner in which Lady Audley relates her condition is extremely passionate and melodramatic:
‘Mr. Robert Audley,….you have used your cool, calculating, frigid, luminous intellect to a noble purpose. You have conquered—a MADWOMAN!….Yes, a madwoman. When you say that I murdered him treacherously and foully, you lie. I killed him because I AM MAD! because my intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and insanity; because when George Talboys goaded me, as you have goaded me; and reproached me, and threatened me; my mind, never properly balanced, utterly lost its balance; and I was mad!….Let [Sir Michael] hear the secret of my life!’ (340-41)
This scene would be very moving in a Victorian theatre as the frightening and mysterious secret of insanity is exposed. Also, Lady Audley compares the actions of Robert as an unfeeling automaton to hers as a madwoman in an eerie tone. In giving her definition of insanity, she suggests that she only becomes insane at a certain moment when George approached her. Indeed, when she finally confesses to Robert how she supposedly killed George, she again says,
‘George Talboys treated me as you treated me…He swore that if there was but one witness of my identity, and that witness was removed from Audley Court by the width of the whole earth, he would bring him there to swear to my identity, and to denounce me. It was then that I was mad. It was then that I drew the loose iron spindle from the shrunken wood, and saw my first husband sink with one horrible cry into the black mouth of the well.’ (386)
Such examples of “partial insanity,” or latent insanity, were associated with monomania by James Cowles Prichard and others in the mid-nineteenth century (xxvi). Lady Audley’s condition also involves moral insanity, in which she experiences improper emotions but her reasoning is not impaired (Matus 338).
Although Lady Audley calls herself a madwoman when she attempts murder, it is not perfectly clear when she technically becomes mad. She is a clever criminal, but committing illegal acts does not necessarily mean a person is insane whether or not he or she is intellectually talented. The fact that she confesses she is a madwoman does not mean she is automatically insane, either. Lady Audley knows well that pleading insanity would probably be the only way she could escape a public scandal and imprisonment. Perhaps her madness is certain when she believes that Sir Michael will always stay with her and love her even when he knows of her crimes and condition. Then again, that would be assigning insanity on the basis of a lack of intellectual capability. At one point, she even considers committing suicide by poisoning herself with opium (330), an act which is often considered ultimate insanity and very sinful. Monomania was first used to describe patients who were extremely depressed and melancholy, those who were most likely to commit suicide. Another way she may be viewed as insane is her quickness in judging others to be insane along with her. For instance, she prods Alicia, Sir Michael’s daughter from his first marriage, to tell her information about Robert’s parents (whom she knew nothing of). When Alicia finally admits Robert’s father was eccentric, (a term Lady Audley brought up), Lady Audley tries to pre-conclude that Robert’s father’s eccentricity was transferred to his son as madness (275-76). The characters in the novel all agree that Lady Audley is mad, but the reader is left the opportunity of questioning the verdict. Braddon might be subtlely suggesting to the reader that diagnoses of insanity in Victorian England were altogether too common and not well enough researched before the victim was put away forever in an insane asylum.
Whether accurately or not, Lady Audley sincerely believes her type of insanity is hereditary. Her mother supposedly became mad upon giving birth and lived in an insane asylum close by when she was growing up (344). Thus, Lady Audley inherits the seeds of insanity from her mother that arise when she gives birth to her son. “My baby was born, and the crisis which had been fatal to my mother arose for me” (347), she avows. By the time Lady Audley’s Secret was published in 1862, doctors were diagnosing a certain type of madness that appeared up to four weeks after giving birth as puerperal insanity. Surprisingly, about a tenth of asylum inmates were classified as being puerperal maniacs (Matus 342). Lady Audley seems to fit this mania perfectly, especially since it was often associated with mothers who had aversions to their new-born infants. She admits:
‘I did not love the child; for he had been left a burden upon my hands. The hereditary taint that was in my blood had never until this time showed itself by any one sign or token; but at this time I became subject to fits of violence and despair. At this time, I think my mind first lost its balance, and for the first time I crossed that invisible line which separates reason from madness…I have seen [my father] soothe me as only mad people and children are soothed.’ (347-48)
Again, Lady Audley suggests she has a condition of partial insanity that turns on and then turns off at definite points in time. Just as her mother was isolated from her, Lady Audley distances herself from her child. She believes that parents who are mad are most likely to transmit their insanity to their children who are of the same gender as they are (275-76). Thus, she credits her insanity to heredity, one of the most commonly blamed causes of madness in the Victorian era.
There are many instances in the novel that foreshadow Lady Audley will self-destruct due to her inability to love. Her utter lack of love for her child, as seen above, is one such example. Another is her disregard of the seriousness of marriage to the point that she is not embarrassed to criticize her husband mercilessly. Soon after she marries George Talboys, she tells him that he “ought not to have married her if [he] could give her nothing but poverty and misery; and that [he] had done her a cruel wrong in making her [his] wife” (24). This is an abnormal, destructive way of treating a new spouse and certainly demonstrates her lack of love. In a passage later in the novel, she again expresses her contempt for marriage. Her only notion of marriage is the way it enables her to improve her social rank, but the personal aspect of the sacred union is utterly lost to her. At dinner with her extended family, she says, “‘Dear me!….I did not think men were capable of these deep and lasting affections. I thought that one pretty face was as good as another pretty face to them, and that when number one with blue eyes and fair hair died, they had only to look out for number two with black eyes and hair, by way of variety’” (88). Immediately after that, she mocks love and marriage again—“‘How sad!….it seems almost cruel of Mrs. Talboys to die, and grieve her poor husband so much’” (88)—when she belittles her first husband’s attachment to her. Such scorn of marriage is very unnatural in a time when women often had to marry in order to be accepted by society. Lady Audley may initially appear to others to be the embodiment of Victorian feminine goals, but she does not understand the depths of virtues such as love and morality that are the reason for achieving the goals. Throughout her life, she “cheats” her way to get to the top: she marries without love, she gives birth without being a mother, and she becomes wealthy without working. Whether from Victorian self-suppression or egoism, she deceives herself about the sanctity of marriage, which eventually causes her grief.
Several encounters with people and animals also suggest Lady Audley’s instability and madness. Right after Robert and George see the pre-Raphaelite portrait of her, (which is perhaps the most telling object of her wickedness other than the ring she wears on a black necklace and the baby shoes in her jewelry box), she and Sir Michael pass by them in their carriage. It is dark and a storm is brewing, but Lady Audley and George probably recognize each other. When Lady Audley goes to bed that night, she is stricken with fear that she has been discovered. Her husband describes the transformation she undergoes: “‘Do you know, Lucy, that once last night, when you looked out through the dark green bed-curtains, with your poor white face, and the purple rims round your hollow eyes, I had almost a difficulty to recognise my little wife in that ghastly, terrified, agonised-looking creature, crying out about the storm’” (78). Soon after Robert decides he will dedicate the future to learning about George’s fate and drafts a list of facts about his disappearance, Lady Audley shows her unease of mind when she takes a stroll with Phœbe Marks, her maid, in the lime-walk. Her thoughts are tormented by the cold October winds, and she anxiously wonders aloud if she will grow old. Then she tells Phœbe a story about a Parisian woman who was loved by society but committed a crime and was later hanged (109-10). Thus, when Lady Audley interacts with her maid, she herself predicts the degree of troubles she must face. Animals sense something is very wrong with her, too. Cæsar, the dog belonging to Alicia, shows his teeth and barely restrains growling when he meets Lady Audley (80), who is not able to control her horse when she goes riding (110). Ominous warnings of Lady Audley’s downfall result from natural forces—her conscience, animal instinct, and the wild weather, which are all melodramatic.
Even Dr. Mosgrave’s advice does not resolve the question of Lady Audley’s insanity. When Robert relates what Lady Audley has done to maintain a bigamous marriage, the doctor bluntly says there is no sign of madness. Running away was rational since she expected to find a better home; committing bigamy made sense because she could elevate her social position. Her other crimes required intelligence and patience, which are perfectly normal. Dr. Mosgrave does not even think her heredity is cause for concern until he visits her and sees she is dangerous. He diagnoses that Lady Audley is not mad but has latent insanity (370, 372). Thus, she is whisked away to an asylum because she is a danger to society, but no one knows if she is really insane.